Movie To Make You Think

This past weekend, we went on a movie date. It’s not totally comfortable sitting through movies at this point in pregnancy, but we don’t have much time left to enjoy our family-of-two freedom. We went to see “Milk” and it was pretty good. Before the movie came out I had never heard of Harvey Milk, but after reading a bit about the movie I wanted to see it. Plus, I’m a big James Franco fan, so I like to see whatever he’s in.

“Milk” was a really good movie, and all of the actors in it were great. Very believable and effective at playing real people, which I think is always tough for actors to pull off. The story was pretty interesting too. I never knew a thing about the gay rights movement of the ‘70s, so it was definitely eye-opening. It’s actually kind of strange to me that we never learned about the gay rights movement in any classes in school (not even in college) because we learned about pretty much all the other rights movements that were going on at the time, like women’s rights and civil rights. I know some people don’t agree with the comparison between gay rights and civil rights, but I think the similarities are clear. When one group of people is being discriminated against in any way, they are being stripped of the equal rights that we are promised as Americans.

The movie centered around Harvey Milk becoming the first openly gay person to ever be elected to public office and his role in fighting Proposition 6, a proposition on the California ballot in 1978 that would allow employers to terminate employees on the basis of sexual orientation. After the movie, it hit me that now 30+ years later they’re still fighting for equal rights. And that’s sad. The timing of the movie couldn’t have been more relevant with the whole gay marriage fight going on in California, and the passing of Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage this past November. Knowing all of that and realizing that the country hasn’t come so far on this issue since the ‘70s made the movie that much more powerful.